The communal construction of mental illness makes recovery a daunting challenge since society largely perceives the psychiatrically ill as ‘deficient’. Not only does one have to deal with the illness itself, one additionally has to deal with the perpetual stigma associated with the labeling, increasing the personal consequences of these illnesses. In my own journey through mental illness, I have repeatedly tried to construct for myself those structures which would help me...
Topics: autoethnography, mental illness, recovery bipolar disorder, narrative reconstruction, social...
I offer an autoethnographic inquiry into the process of finding one’s way out of the maze of mental illness; it is an examination of how in the course of creating music to express my suffering from bipolar disorder, I found a poetic and musical expression for my soul. Making music gradually moved my focus away from illness toward imagination and creativity and brought about a major shift in my positioning in terms of my identity, helping me to construct the selfhood of an artist rather than...
Topics: music therapy, mental illness, recovery mental illness, autoethnography, qualitative research,...
